How to evaluate a CEO’s capital allocation skills

Over time, the skill with which a company’s managers allocate capital has an enormous impact on the enterprise’s value.

The lack of skill that many CEOs have at capital allocation is no small matter: After ten yearson the job, a CEO whose company annually retains earnings equal to 10% of net worth will have been responsible for the deployment of more than 60% of all the capital at work in the business.

Now pause and reflect, how often financial pundits talk about capital allocation skills of a manager when they are evaluating a CEO or MD of a company, not often. In fact a lot of reported results and press releases focus on earnings and sales, while the crucial capital allocation decision and their consequences are missed.

In this post we would learn through an example on how you can assess a management’s capital allocation skill though reported numbers. This post is largely built on a superb paper written by Michael J. Mauboussin in August 2014, download a copy from here

To evaluate capital allocation of any firm’s manager, you need to focus on following things

Sources and Uses of Cash flows

ROIC – The capital allocation Test

Value created with every dollar retained

We will discuss each one of them one at a time

Sources and Uses of Cash flows

The paper written by Michael J. Mauboussin provides a very succinct snapshot of sources and uses of cash flows, You can see it below

Once you understand sources and uses, you can easily map them to the cash flow statement reported annually, We did a similar exercise for Take Solutions, a global technology solutions and service provider of Life Sciences, Supply Chain Management & Enterprise Solutions. Understanding their sources and uses of cash flows from year 2008-2015

See below snapshot

Most of the money (80%) invested in business was internally financed through CFO

Remember,

There are pros and cons to having internal financing represent a high percentage of investment funding. The pro is that companies are earning high returns on capital in general and need not rely on capital markets to fund their growth. The con is that companies can deploy internally-generated funds into value-destroying investments. The need to raise money from the capital markets creates a check on management’s spending plans.

For Take Solution, since most of money was redeployed in business, Management’s capital allocation skills become extremely crucial

Now the discretionary cash can be spent in the following ways

Invest in the business itself if the returns are good – most common approach. Value adding if the business earns more than cost of capital

Acquire other company

Return cash to shareholder via dividends or share buyback

Just hold cash and do nothing

Analysing Take’s cash flow from 2008 to 2015 we find that all of cash generated from business has been redeployed in business. They have done few small acquisitions as well like in 2011 (TAKE Solutions acquired 100 % of UK based WCI Consulting Group)

ROIC – The capital allocation Test

Understanding intrinsic value is as important for managers as it is for investors. When managers are making capital allocation decisions – including decisions to repurchase shares – it’s vital that they act in ways that increase per-share intrinsic value and avoid moves that decrease it. – Warren Buffet

However there is no reported metrics to gauge capital allocation in Annual reports, This is where framework provided by above paper comes to our rescue

A useful first step in assessing capital allocation is to see how much was invested in each area for an incremental dollar of sales over time.

First, we need to understand how many cents company has spent on fixed and working capital for $1 dollar increase in sales ,For Take Solutions between 2008 and 2015, incremental fixed capital rate is 55% and Incremental working capital investment rate is 9% calculated as below

To arrive even at better insights you can calculate above with rolling totals instead of point to point. The above figures corroborate that company has to continually invest in software products to increase its top line.

The second component to assessing capital allocation is determining the output of management’s decisions through an analysis of return on invested capital (ROIC) and return on incremental invested capital (ROIIC).

We calculated Take’s ROIC as below

As evident from above in last 3-4 years the ROIC has improved significantly.

Academic research shows that the market rewards investment in organic growth in high return businesses. Typically, companies that earn high ROICs are said to have some sort of competitive advantage. A quick analysis of ROIC indicates whether a company has a competitive advantage and, if so, what lies at the foundation of that advantage.

Bruce Greenwald, a professor at Columbia Business School, argues that there are two sources of competitive advantage: consumer advantage and production advantage.ROIC can provide a quick and useful way to investigate competitive advantage. You can decompose ROIC into two parts, a modified version of what is known as a DuPont Analysis – Both ratios reflect consumer advantage and production advantage

A consumer advantage is the result of the habitual use of a product, high costs of switching to a new product, or high costs of searching for a superior product. A production advantage allows a company to deliver its goods or services more cheaply than its competitors can either as the result of privileged access to inputs or to proprietary technology that is difficult or costly to imitate. A competitive strategy analysis focuses on identifying these sources of advantage and assessing their durability.

Breaking Take’s ROIC we understand that high ROIC is driven by consumer advantage, detailed examination should be made to understand why the firm has consumer advantage

Shifting our focus to ROIIC

One potentially useful measure is return on incremental invested capital, or ROIIC. ROIIC properly recognizes that sunk costs are irrelevant and that what matters is the relationship between incremental earnings and incremental investments.

Take’s ROIIC can be calculated as follows

It is preferable to calculate ROIIC on a rolling three- or five-year basis from above we can’t conclude on economic value added by incremental capital

Value created by every dollar retained

Final numerical test you can run is to determine value created by every retained dollar in business

In 1984, Buffett made these comments

“Unrestricted earnings should be retained only where there is a reasonable prospect – backed preferably by historical evidence or, when appropriate by a thoughtful analysis of the future – that for every dollar retained by the corporation, at least one dollar of market value will be created for owners. This will happen only if the capital retained produces incremental earnings equal to, or above, those generally available to investors.”

We put Take solutions to above test on a 5 year rolling basis

The above table shows that management has started deploying retained earnings in effective manner with improving returns for every rupee retained progressively

Summary

Using the above framework, you will be equipped to understand

Sources and uses of cash of the firm – With an insight on whether operations are self-funded or not

Great article, Wouldn’t you also include goodwill in your capital employed calculation given so many acquisitions. Also, the capital employed figures that I have are around ~ 820 Crores (NW- 524 Crores and Liabilities of 240 Crores and MI of 56 Crores). The numbers look very different if you do that. Also on the NWC part, intuitively I feel the sitaution has deteriorated. If you look at DSOs it has increased very sharply. I would believe that incremental capital has got tied in working capital more than fixed assets. I believe that’s the reason their return metrics are not that great inspite of improving profitablitly

Hi Rohit,
Thanks for bringing in an important point, As I stated in article there are two ways to calculate IC, One is via left hand side of balance sheet by looking at what owners and lender have put in and other way is to calculate by using assets operated by business. Almost always asset side calculation is better but for modeling perspective I have calculated from Liabilities side.

Coming back to your question on goodwill, yes it needs to be included in calculation. On WC, I had over looked that item and if this is case we should probe a little further, They sell to MNC so chances of bad debts is almost NIL, But we need to answer then why DSO is declining, Are they offering lenient terms for more wallet share ? Any insights ?

I am learning curve as far TAKE is considered so your inputs are appreciated

I must say having followed your posts for the past 2 years, you do really “add value to the value investing”.

The width and depth of the scope of your posts is immense!

Neat illustration of the consumer/production advantage portions of the DuPont formula. Did not see it that way prior to ur post.

I believe among the 2, consumer advantage is more prone to disruption through technology(s/w).
For instance, BFSI space to be disrupted through payment banks which are essentially providing better consumer ease/experience through app/wallet. Despite the switching costs associated with a bank account, chances of consumer still making the switch are high when the self-evident benefits are massive.

On the other hand, production advantage is less prone to disruption. When we consider, the low-cost/efficiency/economies-of-scale are due to state-of-art physical machinery/equipment for which one does get sufficient time to adapt/implement.

Hello Vishnu -Thanks for your kind words, the respect is mutual having seen your work in pharma space 🙂 impact of technology disruption is very company / industry specific. Let say hypothetically payment banks are allowed to keep gold deposits will people switch ? May not as giving gold to a FI depends on how much we trust that org /brand and how long it’s been in operations. So my preference is to judge this threat locally instead of thinking on generic lines.
Hope it helps

I agree, one cannot generalize these things. Besides payment banks due to the 1 lac deposit limit will not completely obsolete the normal bank account(/gold deposits), but will more likely cannibalize the transaction-space – its intended target.

Anyways we digressed, but like u said evaluating the benefits of one over the other is subjective depending on the analysis of the specific company/industry.

Rereading the “Measuring the Moats” paper by Michael J. Mauboussin, to get a better understanding.

1. Is “consumer advantage” also a gross margin, i used while i was buying eicher in 2011-12, GM was increasing YoY coupled with adv from customer.

2. For assessing capital allocation apart from what you mentioned, is it another way like looking @ asset turnover ratio, decreasing working capital days (to certain extent), decreasing cash conversion cycle ?.

Hi Mahesh – There are more than one way to infer if company has consumer advantage, Yes gross margin is one, also pricing power, know brand and customer stickiness all indicate some sort of consumer advantage
On Point 2 – I dont think so we can asset turnover ratio per se, because that means company is sweating it’s assets well.

Thanks Vivek Ji, Thats enough, learning lot from your blog especially on how to read AR’s, i usually read AR’s and keep in my brain & forget :-), you way of reading liked it and following and did for hester bio science and bought @ 450 odd. Keep educating.